A LETTER TO FRIENDS

In July, the leaders of 15 major environmental groups sent a
joint letter to all their members saying, "You have never
received a letter like this before. This is the FIRST TIME the
combined leadership of the nation's leading environmental groups
have sent a single call to action to our combined memberships.

"Even during the Reagan/Watt/Gorsuch years, we have never faced
such a serious threat to our environmental laws in Congress.
Polluters have blocked virtually all of our efforts to strengthen
environmental laws, but still they are not satisfied. Now, they
are mounting an all-out effort to WEAKEN our most important
environmental laws."

The letter was signed by the leaders of the American Oceans
Campaign; the Center for Marine Conservation; Defenders of
Wildlife; Environmental Action Foundation; Friends of the Earth;
Greenpeace USA; League of Conservation Voters; National Audubon
Society; National Parks and Conservation Association; National
Wildlife Federation; Natural Resources Defense Council; Sierra
Club; Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund; The Wilderness Society; and
Zero Population Growth.

This week 173 citizens responded to the leaders of the Big 15
with a letter of their own. Here is the text of the citizens'
letter, verbatim:

We are responding to your "Dear Environmentalist" letter of
mid-July, which you sent to the combined membership of your
groups.

We would like very much to meet with you about the problems you
raised. We want to talk about something your letter did not
mention: the source of these problems.

Some of us are associated with national environmental
organizations, while others are actively engaged in community
struggles for environmental justice and democracy. We are of
diverse colors and backgrounds, live in different regions, and
include trade union, religious and electoral activists, as well
as survivors of industrial disasters, and shareholder rights
advocates.

In your letter, you wrote:

"...we have never faced such a serious threat to our
environmental laws in Congress. Polluters have blocked virtually
all of our efforts to strengthen environmental laws...[and] they
are mounting an all-out effort to weaken our most important
environmental laws."

We know this is true. We also know that while such assaults are
under way in Congress, people in neighborhoods across the country
are suffering injuries to health and life --from chemicals,
radiation, incinerators, power plants, clear cutting, highway
building, disinvestment, and so forth. We also know that
dignified jobs doing socially-useful work at fair pay are scarce
and getting scarcer; that wages are declining; that democracy is
too often a delusion at local, state and federal levels.

And we know that nature is under attack, that many species,
ecosystems and wilderness areas have been ravaged.

What prompts us to send this letter to you is our conviction that
you have not identified those subverting Congress as our real
adversaries in the struggle to save our communities and the
natural world: the leaders of today's giant corporations, and the
powerful corporations they direct.

We believe the Earth has never before faced such large-scale
devastations as are being inflicted by handfuls of executives
running the largest 1000 or so industrial, financial, health,
information, agricultural and other corporations. And not since
slavery was legal have the laws of the land been used so
shamelessly to violate the democratic principles we hold dear.

This was not supposed to happen. It is true that the grand
ideals of the American Revolution have not yet been fulfilled,
and that many people are still struggling, to gain the legal
rights and constitutional protection for which so many fought
against tyrannical English monarchy. But for several generations
after the nation's founding, the role of corporations in both
government and society was strictly limited by law and custom. A
corporate charter was considered a public trust. Corporations
had no rights at all except what the people chose to give them.

Ironically, however, corporations have achieved a level of
constitutional protection which many citizens still do not enjoy.
The leaders of giant corporations govern as monarchs of old who
claimed legitimacy under divine right theory. Yet your letter
never once refers to multi-billion dollar corporations such as
Exxon, Philip Morris, General Electric, Union Carbide,
Weyerhaueser, WMX Technologies (Waste Management).

You write of lobbies, special interests, polluters and radical
property rights advocates. But the work of these lobbies,
polluters and radical advocates --in Congress and in our
communities --is the work of corporations that manipulate assets
beyond our imaginations while hiding behind limited liability,
perpetual existence, and our Bill of Rights.

To a large extent, corporations have been given these legal
rights and privileges not by our elected representatives, but by
appointed judges. This did not happen by accident: Corporate
leaders funded scores of research, propaganda, and lobbying
organizations (using pre-tax dollars, which means that corporate
lobbying and propagandizing are subsidized by us). You know the
list: the U.S. and state chambers of commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers
Association, The Competitive Enterprise Institute.... With "Wise
Use" groups, and the help of foundations such as Olin, Scaife,
Bradley and Smith Richardson, along with legal think tanks,
corporate executives violate elections, buy and sell our
legislators, and intimidate citizens.

We believe that it is too late to counter corporate power
environmental-law-by-environmental-law,
regulatory-struggle-by-regulatory struggle. We don't have
sufficient time or resources to organize chemical-by-chemical,
forest-by-forest, river-by-river, permit-by-permit,
technology-by-technology, product-by-product, corporate
disaster-by-corporate disaster.

But if we curb or cut off corporate power at its source, all our
work will become easier.

One major source of corporate power goes back to 1886, when the
U.S. Supreme Court decreed that corporations are persons under
the law. This legal doctrine of corporate personhood guarantees
constitutional free speech and other protection to corporations,
thereby preventing our elected legislatures from limiting
corporation interference in elections and lawmaking, in our
courts, and in policy debates. Other court-made legal doctrines
give corporate leaders legal authority to make private decisions
on very public issues: energy, chemical and transportation
investments, product choices, forest and mineral use, technology
development, etc.

How would restricting corporations' constitutional protection
enable us to stop corporate-led environmental destruction? Look
at takings, for example.

When government wants to use an individual's property for a park,
or for a sewage treatment plant, that individual has every right
to petition for redress, for "due process of law." But corporate
leaders claim this constitutional right of redress for their
corporations, arguing that laws and regulations to protect public
health and the environment, to protect workers' rights, are
takings "without due process."

They can do this so effectively because a century ago, corporate
leaders convinced courts to transform our laws. Ever since,
wielding property rights through laws backed by our government
has been an effective, reliable strategy to build and sustain
corporate mastery.

So it is understandable that many people today believe we have no
choice but to concede property (such as takings), free speech and
other rights to corporations, and to continue addressing
corporate harms one-by-one.

We disagree: we believe we have a social and political
responsibility to reject concocted constitutional doctrines which
enable undemocratic corporate dominion.

We support without reservation people's rights for redress
against government takings, and peoples's protection against
tyranny as provided in our Bill of Rights. But we do not believe
corporations share such rights with flesh-and-blood people.

We have no illusions that reclaiming people's rights from the
fictions which are corporations will be easy: as Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter observed, "The history of
constitutional law is the history of the impact of the modern
corporation upon the American scene."

But what's our alternative? The REAL takings going on today are
corporate takings --of our lives, liberties and pursuits of
happiness, and of other species --without due process of law.

The REAL takings today are planned and executed by corporate
executives who are protected by the legal shields which are giant
corporations, and who are showered with honors by our
corporation-controlled culture.

Corporate tactics such as takings, risk assessment, unfunded
mandates --at a time of escalating grassroots opposition to
NAFTA, GATT and to corporate investments around the globe
--provide opportunities for your organizations to go on the
offensive. You can educate your members that the authority to
define corporations still rests with the people.

You can help us change the legal doctrines and laws which give
corporations overwhelming advantage over people, communities and
nature. Together, we can get the giant corporation out of our
elections, out of our legislatures, out of our judges' chambers,
out of our communities, and off our backs.

But if you do not write and talk about today's large corporation;
if you do not educate and mobilize your members as you know how
to do, our legislatures will face crisis after crisis like the
one you described in your letter. Corporate leaders will
strengthen their grip on the law and escalate their takings
across the Earth.

Together, we can end the nation's long silence about corporate
power and manipulation. We can work together to save our
democracy in order to save our communities and our natural
environment.

We want to meet with you to plan strategies for confronting
corporations. [End of text.]

[The letter to the Big 15 was signed by 173 individuals. Anyone
wishing to stay informed about the discussion that the letter is
intended to provoke should phone 1-800-625-3929 and ask to add
his or her name in support of the letter to the Big 15. Give
your name, address, and daytime phone number; you will be
contacted.]
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--Peter Montague